Jizoji Temple Hojuin Main House

The House at the Center of Hojuin

Jizoji Temple Hojuin Main House (地蔵寺寳珠院主屋, Jizōji Hōjuin Shuoku) is a two-storey wooden house built in 1904 in Matsushima-cho, Komatsushima City, Tokushima Prefecture, and was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 29 November 2016. Of the eight registered properties in the Hojuin compound owned by Jizoji Temple, this is the one everything else is arranged around.

The roof is gabled (Kirizuma-zukuri) and laid in heavy round-and-flat Hongawarabuki tiles, with the house facing south. On all four sides a lean-to Geya roof in lighter pan tiles (Sangawara-buki) runs beneath the eaves, so the building wears two kinds of tile, one above the other. It covers 160 square metres, the largest footprint of any building at Hojuin.

Inside, the plan divides east from west. The entrance and an earthen-floored Doma work area sit toward the east; the tatami rooms run west from there. The formal reception room takes the southwest corner, where it looks onto the garden, and an inner veranda wraps around two of its sides. The best room was put exactly where the view of the garden is widest.

The upper floor is living space too, not storage. In the southeast corner is a 12-mat room, a second large reception room placed diagonally opposite the one downstairs. By the standards of a town house in a port at the end of the Meiji era, this was a household of some standing.

Why It Was Called an Outstanding Modern Japanese House

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the Jizoji Temple Hojuin Main House as an outstanding example of the modern Japanese-style house and registered it as a "model of form and design."

The point is not that it copies a traditional farmhouse or merchant row house. It shows, in good quality, the kind of Japanese-style dwelling that well-off town families were building after the Meiji Restoration, when a house was increasingly a place for receiving visitors. Upstairs rooms used as full living space, and a formal room edged on two sides by a veranda, are both marks of that shift.

Seen against the rest of the compound, its role becomes clear. The storehouse went up the year before, in 1903, and the main house followed. In the Taisho era the household moved the kitchen work into the kamaya, put a private guest room and bath in the annex, and added a guest lavatory at the end of the veranda. The main house is where that expansion started, and the outbuildings, gates and walls are all placed in relation to it.

What to Look For

From outside, look at the roof. The main roof in round-and-flat tiles and the skirt of pan-tiled lean-tos below it differ in tile shape and in texture, and that layering is readable from beyond the wall.

Inside, the official record picks out the southwest reception room with its two-sided veranda and the 12-mat room upstairs. The garden only works because the middle gate and wall close it off: a visitor entering by the front gate is steered toward the entrance before reaching the middle gate, and the garden is meant to be seen from the reception room, not from the path.

Seeing the Main House

The Jizoji Temple Hojuin Main House is part of a private, temple-owned residence, and there are no scheduled opening days. Anyone hoping to go inside should contact Jizoji Temple before visiting.

From the road, the great roof is visible above the front wall, but the front of the house lies behind the wall and the middle gate, so the whole building cannot be seen from the street. Photograph from the public road and keep clear of neighbors.